Chapter XXII · ON MIXTURE IN LANGUAGE.

There are two senses in which we may speak of mixture in language—the broader sense in which every speaker must influence those who hear him, and be influenced by them in turn, and the narrower sense in which one language or one dialect is influenced by another with which it is but distantly connected.

In order to understand the process of such mixture as this, we ought to observe, in the first place, what passes in the case of individuals. The circumstances leading to such mixture may be best observed in the case of persons who speak more than one language. Bi-lingualism on a large scale, of course, is best seen where a community resides upon the confines of two linguistic areas, as on the borders of England and Wales. It may, again, be due to the sojourn of a person in a foreign country: it becomes more marked still when persons pass from one country and settle in another; and still more when large masses of people are permanently transferred under foreign domination by conquests and by colonisation, as in the case of the inhabitants of British India or the French population of Lower Canada.

The knowledge of a foreign tongue may also be imparted by writing, as when we learn classical Latin and Greek; but in this case, the influence exerted by the foreign tongue is felt only by the better educated classes of society.

In all cases where nations have been brought into contact, and have been mixed on a large scale, bilingualism is common. It is natural to expect that, of the two languages employed, that of the more prominent nation will gain a preponderance over the other, whether its prominence be due to its power, or industrial or intellectual capacity. There will be a change, in fact, from bilingualism to unilingualism; and the process will leave traces more or less marked on the superior language.

An instance of this process on a large scale was afforded by the Roman Conquest of Gaul, the consequence of which was a struggle between the tongue of the Latin conquerors and that of the Celtic conquered race. The result was that the Latin ousted the Celtic, but not without leaving traces of the Celtic idiom in certain words, in the pronunciation, and the construction of the language.

But it will be found that the mixture will not easily affect single individuals, so as to transform their diction into a language made up of elements equally, or nearly equally, taken from either of the two conflicting languages. Even assuming that a person is perfectly master of both languages, and that he may pass from one to another with perfect ease, he will yet adhere to one language for the expression of a clause or a sentence. Each tongue may, however, exercise a modifying influence upon the other in the way of affecting its idioms, its accent, its intonations, etc. It may happen that the influence of one tongue may be predominant in particular areas of language, as we see that the English is in Lower Canada in matters of commerce. This leads to such expressions as jobbeur, cheurtine (shirting), sligne (sling), charger le jury, forger, cuisiner les comptes, etc.: see American Journal of Philology, vol. x., 2.213 Of course, where one of two or more languages has been learnt as the mother tongue, this will always have more influence over foreign languages, however perfectly acquired, than the latter will have over the mother tongue; but we must not under-rate the influence which a foreign language may have upon the mother tongue, especially when it is looked upon as fashionable, or as the key to an important literature. The influence of the foreign tongue may obviously spread to persons who are wholly unacquainted with it, by the contact of these with persons who have adopted or assimilated the foreign elements.

The two principal ways in which a foreign idiom may influence the mother tongue are these. In the first place, foreign words may be adopted into the mother tongue and retained, commonly speaking, in a more or less altered form. The English language has borrowed words of this kind from numerous languages. Thus, from Dutch, we get the word sloop (sloep, itself a loan-word from Fr. shaloupe; whence we, again, have borrowed shallop), yacht: yam, from some African language, through the Portuguese: from Spanish—flotilla, cigar (Sp. cigarro), mosquito: from Italian—domino, casino, opera, stucco: from Persian—chess (Persian sháh, a king, through O.Fr. eschac), orange, shawl, rice, sugar. India gives us sepoy; Germany, meerschaum; Russia, a steppe; China, tea; etc.214

In the second place, the method of connecting and arranging the sentences, and the idioms used by the mother tongue may be taken from the foreign language, and this, even though the material of the language be maintained intact.

The chief cause for the adoption of foreign words into the mother tongue is, of course, the need felt for them in the mother tongue. Words are constantly adopted for ideas which have as yet no words to express them. The names of places and persons are the most common among such adopted words, to which may, of course, be added the names of foreign products, such as tea, sago, chocolate. The names of such products may be taken from the language of communities in a very low state of civilisation. On the other hand, when a language finds it necessary to introduce technical, scientific, religious, or political terms, it is fair to suppose that the language which lends the words must be that of a nation in a higher state of culture than the language of the nation which borrows them. There are many words relating to social subjects imported into English from French which may serve to give a good idea of the weak point of the nation which borrows, and of the strong point of the nation which supplies them. Such are numerous works having reference to ease in conversation, such as bon-mot, esprit, ‘wit;’ verve, ‘liveliness; ‘élan,’ spring;’ etc.; and it will be correspondingly found that the language whence such supplies are drawn is very rich in the qualities for which it possesses such abundance of names.

But languages may be tempted to borrow beyond their actual needs when the foreign language and culture is higher prized than the native, and when, accordingly, the usage of such words is considered fashionable or tasteful. Instances in point are the numerous Greek words introduced into classical Latin, such as techinæ (Plautus, Most., II. i. 23), and the numerous French words borrowed by German and English, such as étiquette, chaperon, à outrance.

If a speaker has an imperfect mastery of a foreign tongue, he will be apt to employ, when endeavouring to speak it, numerous loan-words from his mother tongue. He will, in fact, insert into the foreign tongue any number of words which may serve the purpose of expressing the idea which he feels necessary. Such loan-words, of course, take time before they become usual. They cannot become usual unless they are often repeated, and, as a rule, unless they proceed spontaneously from several individuals as the expression of a general need. Even then they may only become current in particular circles: as when, for instance, such technical terms as those applicable to music are borrowed. Such words, when fairly accepted by the language, are treated like other words in the language, and are regarded by the speakers of it as native, and inflected as such. Foreign words, when borrowed, are commonly treated thus. There are no two languages in which the two stocks of sounds are precisely identical. Consequently, the speaker will, as a rule, replace the foreign sounds by those which he conceives most nearly to represent them in his own language; and, in cases where the foreign language possesses sounds not known in his own, he will fail to pronounce these correctly, at least till after much practice. It is well known how very seldom any one masters a foreign tongue so as to speak it without some incorrect accent. Thus it happens that in the cases where a conquering language spreads over a nation speaking a different language, the original language of the conquered people must leave some traces in the production of sounds, and changes will occur in other ways as in accentuation, etc. Numerous instances might be cited of where such invasion of a conquering tongue has occurred on a large scale, as in the case of the Moorish invasion of Spain, the Latin invasion of Gaul, the Norman-French invasion of Saxon England.

In cases where one people merely comes into contact with another in the course of travel or of literary intercourse, the number of those who acquire the language of the foreign people will be necessarily small. The word will, therefore, from the outset, be pronounced imperfectly; the persons who first introduced the word or those who immediately accepted it will insert sounds with which they are familiar among the foreign ones. It thus happens that when a foreign word has once made its way into a language, it commonly exchanges its proper sounds for those native to the language which borrows it. Even those who know the foreign language most perfectly, and are aware of the proper pronunciation of the loan-word, have to conform to the pronunciation of the majority, at the risk of passing for affected or pedantic. For instance, in English, in spite of all the numerous loan-words which occur in the written language, very few new sounds have been introduced, such as the nasal m in employé; and even these sounds are dispensed with among the uneducated, and imperfectly reproduced by many of the better educated. One common result of the adoption of a foreign word into another language is that popular etymology begins to operate, causing the word to appear less strange to those who have borrowed it, as in the familiar instance rose des quatre saisons, ‘rose of the four seasons,’ transformed by English gardeners into quarter sessions rose.215

The changes which naturally affect foreign words upon their reception into the language, must of course be kept distinct from those which affect them after they have become an integral part of the language, when they change according to the laws of sound-change of the language into which they are adopted. In fact, it is often possible to tell the epoch at which a word has passed from one language into another, by noting whether it has or has not participated in certain laws of sound-change. Thus, where in Old High German the Latin t is represented sometimes by t, and sometimes by z (as tempal = templum), ‘temple’ as against ziagil (= tegula = ‘till’), the form with z represents an older stage of borrowing than the form in t; and, again, words in which the Old High German represents the Latin p by ph or f, must be held to represent an older stage of borrowing than those in which it is found as p or b: cf. pfeffer, ‘pepper;’ Pfingsten, ‘Pentecoste,’ as against pîna, (Lat. ‘pæna’): priester (Gk. ‘presbuteros’).

Similarly, such a word as chamber, or chant, must plainly have been borrowed before the period of sound-change when the sound of ch regularly took the place of the Latin c; and this we know to have been the history of the c sound in the dialect of the Ile de France, whence those and other similar forms come to us.

But foreign words are exposed, after their adoption, to the same assimilating forces as when they are first adopted: and one of the transforming forces which should be mentioned is the transference of the native system of accentuation to foreign words. In English, a study of Chaucer or Langland will show us how French words originally adopted and pronounced according to the French method of accentuation, by degrees, and not till after a period of vacillation, passed over to the system common in Teutonic languages: thus Chaucer has lánguage and langáge; fórtune and fortúne; báttaile and battáile; láboure and labóur: thus Pope accentuates gallánt. Of course, words may be so far phonetically modified as to become unrecognisable even by persons who know the language whence they are borrowed. Who, for instance, would recognise in the word pastans216 the French passé-temps, our pastime; or in the common Scotch word ashet, the French assiette. Thus, in the same author, Gavin Douglas, we find veilys (calves), representing the old French word, véel (vitellus). The strangeness may be increased still more by changes which have occurred in the language from which the word is borrowed. Thus our word veal represents an older form of the French language than veau; and the German pronunciation of many French words is that of an older period of French pronunciation; as París, concért, offizíer. German words adopted by Romance languages have been even more violently transformed: who, in the French words tape, taper, would recognise the German zapfen; in the Italian toppo, the German zopf; in the French touaille, the South German zwehle; in the Italian drudo, the German traut? In the same way, the signification of the word in the parent speech may change; as in the case of the French emphase, ‘bombast,’ as against emphasis; biche (‘hind’), etc. Finally, it may disappear in the parent language and survive as a loan-word in the language which has borrowed it; as, for instance, the French word guerre, ‘war,’ in which survives the Old High German werra, ‘quarrel,’ the same word as our war.

The word may be borrowed several times at different periods. It appears in different forms, of which the more recent bears the stamp of the parent language, while the older has been exposed to phonetic changes which have more or less violently acted upon its form. It will generally be found that the meaning attaching to the word when it is borrowed a second time will differ from that which it bears on the first occasion. These words which are more than once borrowed are commonly called doublets; they are very numerous both in French and English, and have been treated of at length by Bréal and Skeat. Instances of such are priest, presbyter; champagne, campaign; preach, predict; prove, probe. Proper names constantly afford instances of repeated forms of borrowing processes; cf. Evans, Jones, Johns; Thomasson, Thomson; Zachary, Zachariah. It sometimes happens that a loan-word long since naturalised in a language receives a partial assimilation to its form in the language whence it originally came; a good instance of this is seen in such forms as honor, color, etc., which, especially in America, are often so written, instead of honour, colour, etc. Sometimes words are adopted into a language from two kindred languages; the signification will then be similar, and the sound will differ but little—the sense, as well as the form, contributing to keep the two words together. German has several of such loan-words borrowed from the French and Latin; as, ideal and ideell; real and reell; which at a former period had an actually identical meaning, but now are differentiated. In English, spiritual and spirituel differ like spiritus and esprit. Some words, again, are borrowed from a language in which they already occur as loan-words. Thus the French have borrowed from English the word square, O.Fr. esquarré. Thus, again, Greek words come to us through the medium of the Latin: whence it is usual to write such forms as Æschylus, Hercules, instead of Aischulos, Heracles. Thus, again, Latin words borrowed from Greek have come into English through the medium of French—cf. such words as music, protestant, religion, etc.; and also such proper names as Horace, Virgil, Ovid, and Livy. Persons conversant with the original naturally refer such words to the language through which they came; and thus, in adopting Greek words, they employ the Latin accent and the regular English termination which represents that French termination whence the English one came. Such words are alopecy, academy, etc.

Derivatives formed with unusual suffixes often receive in addition the regular normal suffix. This is specially the case when a native synonymous suffix is added to the foreign one: as in Waldensian, Roumanian, sometimes the native suffix is substituted for the original suffix of the foreign language; as, Sultana, for Sultaneh. Words are borrowed in their entirety; but not suffixes, whether derivative or inflectional. When, however, a large number of words is borrowed containing the same suffix, these range themselves into a group, and fresh formations are formed upon the analogy of these. Thus, in English, after the analogy of such words as abbey, rectory, etc., we have such words formed as bakery, tannery, brewery: and, again, we find Romance words like French mouchard, ‘a spy,’ Italian falsardo, ‘impostor,’ with the Teutonic suffix: and very many English words with a French suffix; as, oddity, eatable, drinkable, murderous: and, again, poisonous, as against vénéneux in French. In English, again, we find such suffixes as -ist in jurist forming fresh additions to their group by analogy, mostly, however, in educated circles; as, Elohist and Jahvist, though such words spread eventually to the whole nation, as in the case of protectionist. -Ism is another of these, as in somnambulism; and -ian, as in Hartingtonian.

Inflectional terminations are also thus adopted, but more rarely, and only between nations that have been in close contact. In German it is common to use Christi as the genitive of Christus, and often the French plural in s is applied to German words, as in Frauleins. In English, we speak of phenomena, etc., and we employ indices in a mathematical sense. The English genitive ending has found its way into Indo-Portuguese, as in Hombres casa, ‘the man’s house.’ The gypsy dialects have adopted the inflectional terminations of each country where they are spoken.

Words are sometimes affected in their meaning by other languages; and further, the idioms peculiar to one language are affected by those current in another. This influence is called the influence upon linguistic form. The most common instance of the effect of one language upon another in this case, is where, when two words partially coincide in meaning, they are assumed to exactly tally in the whole extent of their meaning. This is, of course, one of the most common faults in translation. Thus an English child, learning French, will often be heard to use expressions like ‘Cela n’est pas le chemin,’ for ‘That is not the way;’ a German will say ‘brought a leading article,’ for wrote; a Frenchman, ‘Can you conduct?’ for ‘Can you drive?’ Sir Charles Dilke, in his Problems of Greater Britain,217 gives an interesting account of the French Language as spoken by the French settlers in lower Canada. It appears that the more educated of these speak a somewhat archaic and very pure French, but that the peasant or shopkeeper will say Je n’ai pas de change, for ‘I have no change.’ He will describe dry goods on his sign-board as marchandises sèches, and will call out when busy ‘J’ai un job à ramplir.’ In public meetings we hear of ‘les minutes,’ and the seconder of a resolution is called officially ‘le secondeur.’ The ‘speaker’ is l’orateur, and ‘Hear! Hear!’ is rendered by Ecoutez.

Sometimes a word is coined in one language after the model of one existing in another language, to supply a want felt by the language which borrows. This is especially the case with technical terms, as when accusative, ablative, etc., are introduced into English from the Latin model; and such words as these are liable to be misunderstood, as they may only tally with one portion of the meaning of the original word, or, indeed, in some cases be a mistranslation, as where, genetivus, ‘the begetting case,’ was taken as the Latin equivalent of γενικός, ‘the general case,’ and accusativus, ‘the accusing case,’ of αἰτιατική, ‘the conditional case.’ Another instance is the word solidarity, which we have coined to express the French solidarité.

Again: entire groups of words, or idioms, are literally translated from one language into another. Thus we hear, in the mouths of Irishmen, such expressions as I am after going, this being the literal translation of the Irish idiom for the rendering of the future tense. Thus the Austrians say Es steht nicht dafür, for ‘it is not worth the trouble,’ because the Bohemians express this phrase by nestojé za to. The following idioms are current in Alsace;218 it will be seen that they are literal French renderings of German phrases. Est-ce que cela vous goûte? ‘Does that please your taste?’ Il a frappé dix heures, ‘It has struck ten;’ Il brûle chez M. Meyer, ‘There is a fire at M. Meyer’s;’ Ce qui est léger, vous l’apprendrez facilement, ‘That which is easy, you will learn it easily;’ Cher ami, ne prends pas pour mauvais, ‘Dear friend, do not take it amiss;’ Pas si beaucoup, ‘Not so much;’ Attendez; j’apporterai une citadine, ‘Wait; I will bring a citadin (drink).’ On the other hand, the South-West Germans employ phrases after the French model; as, Es macht gut wetter, ‘It is fine weather.’

Finally; the syntax of one language may exercise an influence over that of another language. An instance of this has been already given. The form of the French language, which is a Romance language grafted on to a Celtic stock, has been much influenced by Celtic syntax (cf. the mode of expressing numerals, soixante-dix = 60 + 10, parallel to Celtic 3 scores + 10; quatre-vingts = 4 × 20 = Celtic 4 scores, etc.).

Again: as the Slavonic languages can employ one form for all genders and numbers of the relative, we find in Slavo-German the word was (what) correspondingly employed; cf. ein mann, was hat geheissen Jacob: der knecht, was ich mit ihm gefahren bin.

Of course authors may consciously imitate a foreign idiom with the view of producing a particular effect, as when Milton wrote ‘and knew not eating death;’ ‘Fairest of all her daughters Eve.’

In the case of dialects, almost the same remarks hold good as in the case of different languages. Word-borrowing is the most common process. Such words are most readily borrowed as are needed by the borrowing dialect for its own purposes; such as the Scotch words dour, douce, feckless, etc. Sounds, on the other hand, are not easily influenced by kindred dialects. The nearest native sounds are commonly substituted for those of the alien dialect. Of course the case may occur where two dialects have, in the course of their development, so far parted that words etymologically connected have lost all connection in sound. In this case, the sound of the alien dialect will as a rule be maintained. An instance of this is the Scotch unco’ in the phrase unco’ guid, which is really the same as uncouth; but the accent has shifted, and this tends to disguise the origin of the word.